Escalating its response to the processor vulnerabilities revealed recently, Apple has made iOS 11.2.2 available for the iPhone and iPad, and has issued a supplementary security update for macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 to further deal with the "Meltdown" attack vector and the "Spectre" vulnerability for the first time.

Apple's release notes are sparse for the update. Users can get it through the Software Update feature of the Settings application, or install it through iTunes.

The update comes in at 75.5MB for an iPhone X, and 65.7MB on an iPhone 7 Plus.

Following the news that both Intel- and ARM-based processors can be susceptible to various hacks, Apple confirmed that all of the processors on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad were potentially vulnerable to the "Meltdown" and "Spectre" attack vectors. However, the company also declared that it had already implemented some fixes in the latest iOS and macOS releases, with more still to come.

It’s 63.4MB on my iPad. There is a 250MB limit on LTE app downloads, but I’m not allowed to download smaller ‘critical’ iOS updates?

Apple please get your head out of your ass!

I see your point, but it doesn't seem like that big of a deal (at least for Apple), which I’d argue is why they haven't done the same for the App Store and Software Update downloaders. In terms of a SW update this critical, but it’s also something that can surely wait until you get onto WiFi. That said, why not recommend through their official channels that they make updates—even large or non-critical updates—user-forceable via Software Update with a popover that warns the user that it will be using their cellular network.

Will there be a lawsuit for this if people feel that their device has slowed down with this update and then attribute it to rumours of a 30% loss in performance to combat Meltdown and Spectre?

There won’t be a 30% lose of performance. The Meltdown issue was addressed earlier in December. We don’t know what this update is for, though many are guessing it addresses Spectre with an update to Safari (browsers).

The 30% performance hit is considered the max, and was for CPU intensive applications that utilize the OS Kernel. Where you’d see a hit that size would be things like corporate databases, and cloud providers like Amazon Cloud, Google, Microsoft Azure. For iPads and IPhones it’s unlikely any performance hit would be noticed.

The reason it’s such a big problem is because of virtualization, that where many different systems exist on the same hardware. So, the Meltdown flaw is like a backdoor into all of them. Think of one company getting infected with a virus, and immediately every company in your town leaking data.

The cloud providers are scrambling, corporate IT people are pissed because of the extra work, but lawsuits from a consumer perspective aren’t likely. Intel is probably going to offer discounts to their larger accounts, but they do that anyways.

It’s 63.4MB on my iPad. There is a 250MB limit on LTE app downloads, but I’m not allowed to download smaller ‘critical’ iOS updates?

Apple please get your head out of your ass!

I see your point, but it’s really that big of a deal, which I’d argue is why Apple hasn’t done the samefor the App Store and Software Update downloaders. In terms of a SW update this critical, but it’s also something that can surely wait until you get onto WiFi. That said, why not recommend through their official channels that they make updates—even large or non-critical updates—user-forceable via Software Update with a popover that warns the user that it will be using their cellular network.

People, like myself, have been complaining for years. Apple has never provided an explanation. If you’re updating from 10 to 11 for example it makes sense to use WiFi but these little patches are minuscule.

I tried updating the Supplemental 10.13.2 on both of my iMacs (one machine for me, the other for the kids, both 2017's). It worked just fine on one of them, but on the other it said it could not install the update. When I went back into the Mac App Store to try to reinstall it the Supplemental was no longer available as an update. Strange.

Will there be a lawsuit for this if people feel that their device has slowed down with this update and then attribute it to rumours of a 30% loss in performance to combat Meltdown and Spectre?

There won’t be a 30% lose of performance. The Meltdown issue was addressed earlier in December. We don’t know what this update is for, though many are guessing it addresses Spectre with an update to Safari (browsers).

The 30% performance hit is considered the max, and was for CPU intensive applications that utilize the OS Kernel. Where you’d see a hit that size would be things like corporate databases, and cloud providers like Amazon Cloud, Google, Microsoft Azure. For iPads and IPhones it’s unlikely any performance hit would be noticed.

The reason it’s such a big problem is because of virtualization, that where many different systems exist on the same hardware. So, the Meltdown flaw is like a backdoor into all of them. Think of one company getting infected with a virus, and immediately every company in your town leaking data.

The cloud providers are scrambling, corporate IT people are pissed because of the extra work, but lawsuits from a consumer perspective aren’t likely. Intel is probably going to offer discounts to their larger accounts, but they do that anyways.

The performance losses would be most noticeable for applications that benefit significantly from branch prediction, speculative execution, deep pipelines, available cache memory, and the number of and availability of compute units for a given total kernel working set. Things like NoSQL database engines used for Big Data apps come to mind, e.g., Hadoop, MongoDB. Most of these strategies, just like massive parallelization, have to be specifically setup at application compile time but the benefits are still totally subject to both probabilistic driven factors that occur at runtime as well as specific microprocessor architecture variations. So it's never going to be a hard and fast number even between identical general purpose hardware devices like Macs, iPhones, iPads, Windows PCs, etc. Not all applications in the same concurrent mix on a general purpose computer are compiled to aggressively utilize these optimizations, some applications simply don't benefit from these optimizations, and some microprocessors have different numbers of compute units, pipeline capacities, and memory management strategies. That's why Intel and OS vendors have provided such a wide range of possible impacts. They're not being deceptive, it's simply the nature of the beast, just like cache memory strategies.

I fully expect that someone will come up with a very narrow set of specially tailored benchmarks that present a worst possible case scenario for the Meltdow/Spectre workarounds for each of the major OS platforms and try to make hay with the data. But for the other 99.9999% of computer users who run a mix of real commercial applications on their computers the impacts will likely be impossible to detect at the user interaction layer because of the probabilistic nature of the optimizations and mix of apps and services running on any given device. We'll see.

It’s 63.4MB on my iPad. There is a 250MB limit on LTE app downloads, but I’m not allowed to download smaller ‘critical’ iOS updates?

Apple please get your head out of your ass!

I see your point, but it’s really that big of a deal, which I’d argue is why Apple hasn’t done the samefor the App Store and Software Update downloaders. In terms of a SW update this critical, but it’s also something that can surely wait until you get onto WiFi. That said, why not recommend through their official channels that they make updates—even large or non-critical updates—user-forceable via Software Update with a popover that warns the user that it will be using their cellular network.

People, like myself, have been complaining for years. Apple has never provided an explanation. If you’re updating from 10 to 11 for example it makes sense to use WiFi but these little patches are minuscule.

I tried updating the Supplemental 10.13.2 on both of my iMacs (one machine for me, the other for the kids, both 2017's). It worked just fine on one of them, but on the other it said it could not install the update. When I went back into the Mac App Store to try to reinstall it the Supplemental was no longer available as an update. Strange.

The iOS updates worked fine for me. But on my older Mac, the macOS update took a while to install, and now I don’t seem to have wifi/connectivity.

It’s 63.4MB on my iPad. There is a 250MB limit on LTE app downloads, but I’m not allowed to download smaller ‘critical’ iOS updates?

Apple please get your head out of your ass!

You don't have wifi at home? I honestly don't get these kind of complaints.

It should be possible for networks to allow security updates to be downloaded without eating into your allowance.

This is bigger than profit, bigger than charging for data. If we don’t get an handle on these exploits and issue patches as a matter of course (schedule to download when you’re asleep for example) then we won’t be able to trust these computers that hold all our information.

I tried updating the Supplemental 10.13.2 on both of my iMacs (one machine for me, the other for the kids, both 2017's). It worked just fine on one of them, but on the other it said it could not install the update. When I went back into the Mac App Store to try to reinstall it the Supplemental was no longer available as an update. Strange.

The iOS updates worked fine for me. But on my older Mac, the macOS update took a while to install, and now I don’t seem to have wifi/connectivity.

I have a newer MBP and it still took about 15–20 minutes to install. No WiFi issues.

I tried updating the Supplemental 10.13.2 on both of my iMacs (one machine for me, the other for the kids, both 2017's). It worked just fine on one of them, but on the other it said it could not install the update. When I went back into the Mac App Store to try to reinstall it the Supplemental was no longer available as an update. Strange.

The iOS updates worked fine for me. But on my older Mac, the macOS update took a while to install, and now I don’t seem to have wifi/connectivity.

I have a newer MBP and it still took about 15–20 minutes to install. No WiFi issues.

After some more testing, I updated my post.

It seems to be, at least on my older machine, a Safari/web view problem. Firefox works fine.

It’s 63.4MB on my iPad. There is a 250MB limit on LTE app downloads, but I’m not allowed to download smaller ‘critical’ iOS updates?

Apple please get your head out of your ass!

My guess is that a random large app is downloaded at various times infrequently. Here, millions of iPhones after the same update over cellular “could” have an impact. Not discounting your comments just a guess at the reasoning.